The Legacy of Cuba’s Colonial past

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On a smaller scale than that of the capital city, though not less interesting to urban developers and architectural students of Colonial Cuba, the ancient Villa de Trinidad can be considered complementary to Havana, for several reasons.

While Havana is mainly a port and city enclave, Trinidad, also called Trinidad de Cuba, adds a rural charm to its urban attractions. Trinidad is located between the Caribbean Sea and the Escambray Mountains, next to San Luis Valley, one of the island's most beautiful valleys. Trinidad is a town of structures that can be traced to slave estates of old, a town and countryside full of patrimonial richness.

The privileged city of Trinidad offers the variety of a colonial village, valley, mountain, beaches and even caves and rivers — like the Agabama — with legends going back to pre-Hispanic times. Hernán Cortés anchored his ships near the town while on his way to the golden drama of the conquest of Mexico.

Trinidad has buildings that date to the seventeenth century. The old quarters known as "the high part" of the large, modern city, with its twisted, stone paved streets, its squares and parks, attained its highest honor when UNESCO declared it a "Patrimony of Humanity." During the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, Cuba was emerging from its colonial lethargy of more than two centuries to join the world market and the economic prosperity of the nineteenth century through coffee production and, above all, sugar cane production, which led to an opulence built on the misery and human degradation of African slaves.

While Havana, whose economic boom started in those same years, was capable of profiting from such a "boom" during the nineteenth century lasting to today, Trinidad suffered from the paralysis of economic recession, an urban retreat that was already evident by the 1830s. Geography was the determining factor, giving limited possibilities for agricultural expansion since Trinidad was located within the mountains and by the sea. Sugar cane plantations required more and more uncultivated lands. There was a shortage of such lands in Trinidad, while they were in abundance in other parts of the country where settlements were being encouraged, e.g., Cienfuegos or Sagua La Grande.

Much capital, along with families and slaves, emigrated from Trinidad and stimulated new sources of wealth in other territories. Trinidad, thus, remained almost a phantom city with deserted streets and palaces in deplorable decay. That was its condition until relatively recent days, when modern interests (economic, social, cultural and architectural) "discovered" Trinidad. Its urban and architectural treasures and the natural beauty of its geographic environment has brought new, promising and feasible economic investments that have restored and revitalized the precious legacy of the "Trinitarian" colonial past. Since its basic architecture was erected between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the style responds to Cuban colonial baroque, with its equivalent neoclassical style.

Unlike Havana and other important Cuban cities, Trinidad does not have impressive military constructions, but it does have religious buildings, churches and convents, and private residences that have become museums and symbols of the power, luxury and refinement that characterized their first owners. The palaces belonging to the Counts of the Brunet House and of the Iznaga family are outstanding in terms of their baroque traits. The palace of the Cantero family exemplifies the neoclassical style among other surrounding structures in the irregular and tortuous streets of the "higher part," the Trinidad that climbs toward the hills of Escambray.

Those residences, and similar ones in the capital city, in Sancti Spiritus, in Puerto Príncipe and in Santiago de Cuba, were built around interior patios (courtyards), accessible through galleries and rows of arches made of stone or through wooden zolgadizas covered by Spanish roof tiles. Seen from above, red is the color that dominates Trinidad's landscape. Peaked and flat roofs are occasionally disrupted by green flowers that give freshness and shadows along the patios, squares and parks. Like Havana, Trinidad has succeeded in preserving its historical past in its atmosphere and its people, transformed into culture by a slow rhythm of truce and evocation.